Another shooting in Greater Vancouver. Nearly everyone is demanding action by the government and police. News conferences are called to reassure the public. Sociologists and criminologists are trotted out to apportion blame for these shocking violent crimes.

You want to see who's responsible? Perhaps you should look in a mirror.

[...]In corporate terms, the shootings are hostile takeovers in a multibillion-dollar industry. It's a business that has grown with the support, or at least tacit acceptance of many British Columbians. Businesses exist to serve a demand. Success is based on market share, effective distribution and a positive branding.

Police estimate British Columbia has thousands of indoor marijuana growing operations. Much of the product is exported, but the Centre of Addictions Research of B.C. reports about 680,000 British Columbians use marijuana at last once every year. And about 12,000 use other illicit drugs. It's a growth market and those consumers have a lot of influence.

Do you want to stop the killing and put pressure on the gangsters? Forget about another police task force. Let's try the marketplace solution any businessman will understand -- direct action by consumers. Let's boycott marijuana.

After the French refused to join the Iraq war, many Americans boycotted French wine. According to a study published by Stanford University, French wine sales in the United States declined 13 per cent during the first six months of the war. It cost the French wine industry $112 million in just six months.

The boycott didn't change the French position on the war, but it put significant pressure upon an identifiable group within the French economy. Why don't we grab B.C. crime bosses by the wallets and squeeze hard until they eliminate their dangerous behaviour?

One wonders how dearly your average pot smoker holds his weed, or if in any case he would be moved by a call to take on the kind of responsibility Watson suggests. Boycott or legalize, we need to cut the criminal gangs out of the picture.---------In any case, as goes a local joke, the International Olympic Committee needs to review its rules about athletes using cannabis. The 2010 Winter games will be in Vancouver/Whistler and it is rather difficult to walk the streets of these towns without imbibing some second-hand marijuana smoke. Here's a little Olympics-themed art currently on display at Burnaby City Hall:

20 comments:

What's the difference between a bellicose, stinking, obnoxious drunk and a guy walking down the street quietly minding his own business while stoned on pot? The latter is a criminal. Smoking marijuana is a criminal offence here.

Well, in defence of the police, they are under no obligation to pursue every breach of the law: that would be an impossibility; they have to make decisions about how to best use their scarce resources. And besides being an obnoxious bellicose drunk may well be a criminal breach of the peace.

If you want more police and more potheads in jail, offer your fellow citizens and Mayor a compelling argument!

The argument inmplicit above is that one chooses to be a criminal, even if it seems innocuous; and the police choose to ignore the same crime because they have better things to do; and th ecourts have their own agendas, whatever those might be. The result is that many people routinely break the law simply because they don't take it seriously, leading to breaking other laws as a matter of habit. It eventually comes to lawlessness because if one won't enforce the little laws the only ones left are those so big they destroy lives on the city streets. A gram of prevention, as they say....

Well you are probably right that some people are becoming habituated to lawlessness. But all I wanted to suggest was that the police have no choice but to choose what they think is the lesser evil. Every day in Vancouver there are more crimes committed than police to follow. Try reporting some small property crime and see what I mean.Of course this is not a good situation, but it is the situation we face. So, in face of the many people whose solution is legalization of pot, partly as a way of avoiding the greater evil of a law that is not respected, what is your practical program for accepting the lesser evil and pursuing the greater?

Pure-mindedness doesn't wash. Maybe we do need a Mayor Rudi pursuing every broken window, but that will require convincing many middle-class taxpayers they need to stop smoking and start paying for more cops. But today there are far more people who think smoking pot should be allowed in a free society. They may be wrong; this may be the sign of a decadent and dying culture. But regardless, cops and their masters can't ignore the reality of public opinion. Ultimately it's public opinion, not the formalized law, or force, on which society is founded.

Most people obey the law, whatever it is, not out of prudence alone, not even mostly out of prudence, but because they don't want to be law-breakers in their own minds. there's a stigma to being a law-breaker, even if no outsider knows one is. Conversely, when the law is an ass in public, no one cares any more about the stigma, the bound being stretched to mere prudence, to the need for pure order to keep civilians from being shot to death in gang wars. The private person sees criminals not as himself but as the outright killers on the streets, everything else being tiny in comparison and not to bother with. So the bar of criminal behaviour is raised till who knows, maybe only mass-murderer will be worth the efforts of the police, the mere lone killing not being a big enough bother; and the man who kills his wife shrugging it off as pedestrian in comparison.

Arrest the yuppie in the Central Business District for possessing a small amount of pot and toss his ass in jail for a year or two. Start from the bottom and lower the bar. Big crimes getting out of hand? Well, make them so evil in comparison that they will have to stop, being so far extreme that civilians will go crazy at the thought of them. Nail the jay-walker, fine him an destroy his standing in the community. Show the ordinary middle-class person the law is the law for all, and that it's not optional. Then the people will demand and will get real law-enforcement.

But, in a decadent society, will anyone vote for a mayor who criminalizes crimes that the majority don't think are worth bothering with? Yes, if people see the sense of abiding the law for its own sake, which is for the sake of the city and its people. Do they have that sense? Yes, if people bring it into the public debate. But to do so, one must be active in the community, vocal, and insistent. Most people want to obey the law, if only they know it's real and that they are good for doing so. They need encouragement and reinforcement in that, which is why the police should arrest and the courts convict minor crimes.

Your last paragraph, invoking public discussion, doesn't jibe too well with your first two which sound rather totalitarian, which is where those who value obedience to the law above all else inevitably drift.

Furthermore, from experience of previous discussions, I know you also at times argue for individual freedom, which it would seem to me is a concept rather limited if we take it to mean there can be no circumstances where our freedom will suggest to us certain moral or practical ethical imperatives that require we break or ignore certain laws; though ideally, in refusing to acknowledge certain laws we should make clearer where and how we will defend the system that makes us free. You cannot have freedom without the occasional need for civil disobedience.

Arrest the yuppie in the Central Business District for possessing a small amount of pot and toss his ass in jail for a year or two... Nail the jay-walker, fine him an destroy his standing in the community. Show the ordinary middle-class person the law is the law for all, and that it's not optional. Then the people will demand and will get real law-enforcement.

-but if you impose sentences that people think are not commensurable with the crime, or destroy a man's standing for mere jay walking, you probably won't gain respect for the law. I simply don't buy your sense of reality. There are many competing imperatives at play in our shared reality and you can't simply impose one set of imperatives by force of will. You write as if the ordinary person is an impressionable nobody who when shown the way will follow the imperative as it is presented to him. But I don't think most people are like that. I jaywalk from time to time since I don't like wasting time walking in circles and if I deem it safe to cross in the middle of a block I will, in recognition of time-saving imperatives. I know you well enough Dag to sense that you too might recognize certain imperatives that might lead you to contravene what you would deem minor or incorrect laws.

This doesn't mean we live lives antithetical to a society bound by the rule of law. No such society can exist without people who are first of all free to communicate what imperatives they will defend and what they may have to ignore. In other words, a free society requires all of us to represent and defend our idea of the lesser evil. In contrast, the rule of law in a totalitarian society is not a neat place where the trains always run on time, but inevitably becomes arbitrary if there is not a free discussion about, for example, what kind of jay walking should be ignored and what not. This is because cops are not machines with limitless energy: inevitably they make choices about what to pursue. The English common law has the notion of a "fair cop" which is to say that we accept being caught out of the law under certain terms but not others. A cop who goes out of his way to nab us for jaywalking in order to try to make some point - say to impress his visiting cousin - that we don't recognize as legitimate is not respected. Our freedom is not compatible with a zealous cop.

Any society, but most of all a society bound by some kind of shared compact or covenant, has to be founded in the first place on some kind of trade in opinion. It cannot be founded by some strong guy taking it upon himself to punish evildoers so that everyone will obey his law or return to obey a law from which they have since drifted away.

It is all too easy for people who think like us, Dag, to be more concerned with insuring the widespread recognition of the law's imperatives than with the possibility that the rule of the imperative can be eroded not just by failing to obey it but by too zealously enforcing it. We must respect the opinions of our fellow citizens and try to shape them. When we turn to the police as the first line of response and demand a heavy response we will offend many people's sense of what it means to live in a free society. As I say, we will ignore other imperatives that people recognize (in jailing that Yuppie for a year or two you may do a lot of harm to his kids, or his employees, for example). A shared covenant must first be negotiated and continuously renegotiated, and only then will enforcement have legitimacy.

I've written often and at some length here on "anarcho-tyranny" as well as individualism, the first being bad, the latter, good, in my expositions. Let me join the two here briefly.

I used the arbitrary example of Draconian punishment for a minor infraction of the law against what many would consider to be a paradigmatic successful citizen to make clear that it is exactly the latter oho must be made to lead by choice our civilization, and who wish to, have they permission again, now unfortunately lost, given over to elitist Povertarians and lumpen-intellectuals. My example is meant to show that the "average man" is the one who must see himself as the sufferer of the anarchy of the times; the corrector of the times as well: he must show his exact fellows that he is the one who will suffer from the anarchy insofaras he is in prison, his career and family destroyed and perhaps irreparably so. This Draconian correction of the norm is a lesson all want to relearn, I do think so. Nor is it totalitarian: the few, even the one who is genuinely terrorized is a beneficiary of the greater correction. Yes, look to Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov for an easily available lesson in this line of reasoning. The "victim" is seen by all a the one who is martyred for the greater good, true, and is thanked for his sacrifice, even, perhaps in time, giving thanks for his place. The scapegoat, if you will.

Not that this is arbitrary, which is the "anarcho" aspect of anarcho-tyranny. Our Rational and Common Law requires previous consent of the governed. Mush as I would love the job, and am undoubtedly qualified for it, no one is offering me the position of Grand Inquisitor. That job goes to no one, our system not having such a position because we live in a state of Velvet Fascism. Our law is Rational and Positivistic. We do not agree to Draconian Law. We could, and we could do so Rationally. Until such time, my point remains in the realm of rhetoric.

I think some, if not many, would be happier to see a correction in Law as it currently stands in practice. I sugfgest a reviion from below, not from above: that we correct the imbalance between liberty and anarchy by lowering the tolerance of criminality to the least criminal rather than the worst, thus widening the gap between the acceptable and the unacceptable in public. when the law abiding and willingly abiding average man is aware of punishment for infractions, then the society generally will not tolerate the worst of evils. They might, and rightly so, object to Draconian punishments of the minor; but they will not object to the Draconian punishment of the worst. Thus, the lowering of the threshold of tolerance will save most people from the worst of crime and dhimmitude as it is in our benighted time. "If I go to jail for jay-walking, then the criminal must hang." And if the true criminal sees the average man jailed for a minor infraction, he will then see the result of his own crime to be far more impactful than he might otherwise, till undeterred, no doubt.

But the serious difference between me and a totalitarian is that I have a genuine respect for rational jurisprudence. Today our jurisprudence is one of "anarcho-tyranny" within the Velvet Fascist state of arbitrary terror against the average man: The gang killer is set free from prison if he is ever captured and confined, after some piddling term, and the average man, who has committed no illicit act, who has "spoken," for example, is attacked by extra-legal institutions such as the HRCs, arbitrarily, as a form of state terror. There is no Common or Positive law against what is often prosecuted in private phantasy courts as "Hate Speech" as we have seen it in practice here in Canada. That is an example of anarcho-tyranny in the Velvet Fascist state. The man who is "depressed" and beheads his two year old daughter is given four years in prison. Who among us agreed to this? We have not agreed, I argue; we have merely not objected.

anarchy is loosed upon the average man while he is at the same time tyrannized by the arbitrary state. I suggest we change the rules to Rationality.

In case my example of a man who beheaed a two year old girl is seen as too unbelivable, here's a story to clarify it slightly:

Indian Canadian admits to beheading two-year-old daughter

An Indian-Canadian father, who had strangled and then decapitated his two-year-old daughter in the Vancouver suburb of Delta lastyear, has pleaded guilty to second-degree murder.

Forty-eight-year-old Lakhvinder Singh Kahlon had slit the throat of his toddler on the morning of Jan 18 last year at the family home when his wife, Manjit, was away to drop their two elder daughters to school.

When she returned home, the wife found the two-year-old Ravinder beheaded.

Once a year I purchase less than a half ounce of wacky weed from a long time close woman friend. She grows about 20-30 plants a year and sells to the same 20 or so clientele year after year. It supplements her mortgage payments.

I'd decriminalize it for a number of beneficient reasons. I've been drunk twice in my 61 years of life, both times when I was 17, both times I threw up, lesson learned forever.

I had some time once with an ex-Stasi agent, whom I mocked for killing people with "bourgeois tendencies."

His argument, which I admit I helped him with, was that he didn't "arrest" people for having bourgeois tendencies: he "arrested" them for braking the law.

That's fine as far as it goes: it goes against the Rational. It is arbitrary, and his actions were those of a terrorist working for a terrorist state.

Maybe smoking pot is a bourgeois tendency, I don't know. What I will say is that smoking pot is, as far as I understand it, illegal. Thus, if one chooses to smoke pot, one chooses to break the law. Is the law arbitrary? No. We have a right to vote for our laws and to challenge them in Common courts. Till the law is over-turned, breaking the law is illegal. It's no my personal opinion. The law is the same for all if it's Positive and Common and Rational. My general point above is that we live under an arbitrary and irrational administration of justice. When there is one law for you and another for me, we live in a Velvet Fascist version of East Germany.

I don't see how to square that last argument with the fact that I know you'll break a law or two. If the "human rights" commission pulls you up on hate charges, do you intend to deny that you have broken the law - you know how it is worded, could catch much of what you write - or do you intend to say to hell with this law?

How does the law become "rational"? Does it require some master plan that we all agree to, and that's it, from now on no more piddling around like we did in the days of the HRC? Well, master plans never work because there is no method that can stand firm against change and time without becoming irrational. The law becomes more rational by it sometimes being broken in an act of disobedience that others can recognize as just (following arguments like Wally's).

I have no problem with hanging murderers when there is absolutely no doubt as to their guilt. But the idea of putting jaywalkers in prison to make a point strikes me as absurd. First, you can't apply the law unequally so that some bourgeois icon serves as our exemplary victim and still call this a "rational" law, it seems to me. How are our exemplary victims going to be chosen, "rationally"? If the Yuppie gets a year, everyone should get a year. Second, if people are terrorized by their own law - which I would be of falling off the sidewalk if you got time for jaywalking - it's inconceivable that in a free society people would not choose to recalibrate penalties in ways that struck them as more just. How could people accept to be terrorized by their own law? I just can't imagine how people would agree to big time for a crime that is widely committed. It would be an issue for major social divisions. Thus, it would seem big time could only be imposed by some dictator.

It's one thing to argue we live in a state of anarcho-tyranny as maybe we do, quite another to argue as if in the ideal "rational" world breaking any law should land you in prison for an exemplary stretch. What the "exemplary" is trying to demonstrate is not something we can determine from some theoretical position. It will be a point of contention that can't simply be agreed to by all concerned. We have light penalties today because that's what many people seem to think is "just". Convincing them otherwise may be a noble goal, but I can't see how your argument here is going to move people. I'll have to sleep on it to see if I can find more reason in it.

How could you have been so wise at 17 and after only two rough nights? Just another insight into how messed up my youth was! And there was also pot. Would I have been saved by Dag's law? I'm not so sure. In any case, some would have perished from prison time and I'm not sure how he would convince their mothers this was "rational"...

The Rational Law isn't the Revealed Law. In a democracy, the rule of the people in general decide what the laws will be. Our votes determine our legal system, and the people decide who will create and conduct the nature of our jurisprudence. The beauty of it is that it is changeable. If we toss a man in prison for jay-walking, as an example of a triviality, then we can change it by pardon. We can reconsider. We can eliminate the law. We have the power, not someone who decided he got the final word from the gods. People do what works for people at the time in the general interest, not the interest of privilege. and yes often that understanding of what is good and workable comes from mistakes in law, all of which in a democracy can be changed, though the innocent might suffer meantimes.

Essentially, my argument is for a reaction of Authoritarianism not totalitarianism. A law today is a travesty tomorrow, and it can change in a rational system. But it won't change for no reason. And yes, the police decide according to direction from above. If the commanding figures decide all men in the Central Business District will be arrested for jay-walking on Tuesday, then by Wednesday there will be no jay-walking anywhere. Some poor bastard suffers for the good of all. Authority is restored. Or fear, if you like. But it is not a police-state fear, it is the Will of the people.

A Utilitarian General Will? No. People in a Rational jurisprudence can change from time to time, refining as they go, correcting past mistakes. There is no General Will. There is only improvisation in law in a democracy, the people generally deciding how they will conduct the publicly acceptable. And if there are mistakes or injustices, they change. That's not Utilitarianism, it's democracy. It's not a General Will, a dictatorship of the majority: it's simply people acting as they think best at the time with an eye for civil behaviour. Nor is any of this a diktat. We think; but mostly we imagine. We have done both in the case of smoking pot, and we have decided and acted on our best idea for now that the stuff is illegal. Dear Leader didn't pronounce from on high. We the people decided. and until we the people decide it's not illegal and until the courts take the infraction off the books, it's illegal. It's not up to the individual to decide which laws are legal; it's up to the individual to test the legitimacy of the laws, should he so choose, which, a you rightly point out, I do. But there's a price to pay; and one must accept that in advance or stay home. Acting challenges the people's sense of things, and thus they might or might not change according to how people come to see them in light of new evidence or attitude. That's rational.

My point is that we can imagine an extreme scenario and see what we can do from there, working perhaps to the Golden Mean. But let's go to the furthest extreme and find out what it is. The Rational will tell us from there. It becomes the greatest good available, not for the greatest number but perhaps objectively. It's not a pronouncement of the General Will, it's an expression of the voters. And all of it changes according to the practical outcome. We don't like it, we change it later if we did in fact make a well-intentioned mistake unforeseeable.

For now, let's toss Wally in prison and see if it works. If that works, fine. If not we can shamefacedly let him out later and slip him a few joints so he gets over it without too much fuss.

OK, I can accept that argument. But what will strengthen it is an account of the nature of authority, of how it is generated, anthropologically, in time. What exactly is the relationship between "the people", the free individual, the minority, in generating authority, i.e. in generating whatever it is we hold sacred? (For example, in making something sacred, doesn't some kind of free individual have to go first in suggesting something to "the people", and if so, can "the people" be satisfied with making him pay the price for "leaving home" once they have already come to doubt their old law? In other words, Dag, thanks for the defense of authority, but what exactly do you think about smoking pot? And do you think you are where "the people" are?)

Your argument remains a little abstract, out of time. It's not altogether clear why we must forever respect the authority of the law, as it exists at one point in time, if we admit that one day we may sheepishly let Wally out of jail. Many today think we're somewhere between an old law and a new, and if the police think that's where we are why must they invest their time in going after Yuppie pot smokers in order to make a point about "authority"? Can one really make that point absent a compelling account of how authority is generated and re-generated in time, an argument that properly locates "the people" and the free individual? Again, how do we live with our concern that in enforcing one or another currently mind-occupying idea of authority we are not undermining some larger understanding of how we all may come to acknowledge a common authority in a free society? How can we doubt a given authority without undermining our need for authority? Yes, the civil disobedient has to be willing to pay the price for lawbreaking; but similarly don't the authoritarians also at times have to be willing to pay a price to support the freer individuals? If they weren't how could society evolve? We can all resent the free individual for having more freedom, but sometimes that is necessary for the betterment of all in the long term. I resent the king's ability to tax me, and live more freely than me, but if he has a superior regard for freedom in thought and association than does the king of our common enemy, he will probably lead us victorious and so it's worth paying the tax in the long run. Similarly the Yuppie pot smoker may become the best witness to the next generations of the limits on freedom that free pot smoking realizes. But if we throw him in jail, rather than letting him make his own prison house, that lesson can be lost in some debate over pot martyrdom. Again, where does real authority come from?

Disclaimer: On the extremely rare occasions I smoke pot, I fall asleep in about 5 minutes. So, it's not my mini-vacation of choice. But for plenty of people, it is. Ditto cocaine, etc.

The mere fact that these substances are criminalized creates the climate of big money, violence, and all the rest of the sizable social problem. So, what happens if you decriminalize them?

Two things. Either the government steps in and makes a tidy buck, as it is right now here in the States with tobacco, or it recedes into the background of everyday life. Money isn't an issue, and gang/corporate warfare won't happen.

Having a sheepskin in psychology, I've got a bit of knowledge into addiction behavior. At ALL times in history -- the addiction rate among populations of any size is between 1.2 and 2 percent. Yes, even during the 1960s, drugs' supposed heyday. Like it or not, there are always going to be a small segment of humanity that likes to get stoned, on one thing or another.

Should this be feared? Should we, communist-style, send these people to "re-education camps," so as to save ourselves a few cents off our health insurance, and assuage our moral uprightness at the same time? Blecch.

My first comment contrasted a loud drunk with a quiet pot-smoker; That extreme dichotomy is to show that one can be a public nuisance and till behave legally, whereas the the quiet and private pot-smoker is a criminal. I'm not arguing for or against smoking pot or using other drugs per se: my point is of antinomianism. I argue against "scoff-laws" who are not merely privately indulging in a pass-time that is neither here nor there; I argue against those whose behaviour is in this case less obnoxious than a drunk, and that because the pot-smoker is deliberately breaking the law-- because he chooses to ignore the law and the people. The pot-smoker is an anarchist in the worst sense of the term, one who flouts the laws others obey, and so due to some privilege due only to himself. There cannot be two laws governing the same general behaviour. All men are created equal. They are all equal "Before the Law." What applies to you applies equally to me. Yes, there are travesties. Yes, the law is an ass. But our system is better than not. Our democracy is correctable. We don't simply shop for laws we like, we take them all in stride, giving up some pleasures for the sake of good citizenship, if I may sneak away here unnoticed.

My point originally was that to stop major crimes from being dismissed with impunity for the perpetrator is to increase the penalty for the lesser infractors, and for this reason: that most people want to obey the rule, given that they know in advance what the rules are and that we all agree to a greater than lesser extent. That when the man on the street is a walking criminal, he has little to complain about when the drive-by shooter is simply a greater criminal. It's more difficult to complain about an outrage against society when one is a small but essential part of it. Not the act but the attitude that one need not obey laws one doesn't like.

I use the case of tossing a "successful" man in jail. I picked him to show that the highest as well as the lowest must suffer the wrath of the law if things are to be seen to be just. That has to be a practical aspect of law. No, it's not fair. It is merely better and improvable. We live in a democracy, and a rational one. We can try to change what we don't like.

This isn't the place for it, but one can have, as J.S. Mill points out in his inimitable prose style, a "tyranny of the majority" is a dictatorship of great disaster. And to my surprise and delight, this evening's reading brought me to the highly recommended, F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, chapter six, "Planning and the Rule of Law."

I'm back to the books for now. I don't know how on earth people can smoke pot and read afterward. Being drunk has got to be even worse. But these things in themselves are not my business. My interest, and not my business, is the law. I return to it now.